Home Depot guilt and S.F.'s big-box phobia

Laurel Wellman

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, February 5, 2002

A sunny Super Bowl Sunday may be the best of all possible times to visit Home Depot. "It's quarter to three," an agitated-sounding man was telling his female companion as I combed the garden center for foxgloves; by the time I left, the exodus from the parking lot might have led an uniformed observer to suppose there was a can't-miss SUV rally somewhere nearby.

Now, I know it's un-San Franciscan of me to shop at Colma's Home Depot, and believe me, I'm deeply ashamed. Just for the record, I feel guilty every time I use my cordless drill, and this weekend, some part of me wondered whether I shouldn't hide my new mirror mastic in the spare tire well in order to smuggle it into the city.

But has the gravitational pull exerted by such a mass of drywall tape, Goo Gone, and Sunset home improvement books distorted all thought? "I'm getting trashed in the Bernal Journal for being a friend of Home Depot," exclaims Supervisor Aaron Peskin. "Bull."

See, San Francisco's most recent big-box contretemps involves Home Depot's attempt to build a store on the vacant Bayshore Boulevard site formerly occupied by Goodman's Lumber. Hardware store closes, new hardware store moves in -- no biggie, right? Except that the proposed Home Depot is large enough that, under a proposed city law, the store would have to go through a special conditional-use permitting process.

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Of course, the legislation doesn't actually forbid big-box retail chains from coming to the city, presumably a concession to the Constitution. On top of this, it was incorrectly reported -- not in this paper, bien sur! -- that Peskin had withdrawn his support for the law. So emotions are running high, as emotions do, particularly in San Francisco.

What actually happened, Peskin explains, was that an anti-Home Depot neighborhood group used his name on some literature distributed at a meeting. He asked the group to remove it. "It is my responsibility to come into any meeting with an open mind," says Peskin, while conceding he is not a fan of big-box retail."

If passed, the laws would allow the city to impose many conditions on new big-box stores in San Francisco -- in this case, say, that Home Depot ensure that Cortland Avenue traffic not be affected. "(The store would be) huge," says Peskin. "It's ridiculous to say there won't be transit impacts. So let's talk about how we're going to mitigate them. We were able to do it for the new Giants stadium.

Meanwhile, it may interest you to learn that participants in a symposium on evolutionary theory suggest that dot-commers may represent the next step on our long crawl up out of the primordial ooze.

But first, reader mail. "San Francisco has lots of pompous rich people in the guise of lawyers and brokers, but they never get attacked, presumably because they were always here," writes Sean Beckett. "Sure, the dot-com rush boosted rents, and that blows for everyone, but rents are cheap in a recession.

Is that what San Francisco wants?"

That's exactly what I've been saying for months now, but does anyone listen to me? Oh, no, of course not. Well, I'll just sit over here while you talk amongst yourselves.

"I see the issue as being the natural resentment of any people to having their community treated as a disposable commodity," comments Riley B. VanDyke. "The attitude that San Francisco was desirable only to the extent that it could amuse was the central reason the so-called dot-com invasion was so strongly resented by long-term San Francisco residents."

And yet, says Peter Ahern, "I was so glad that the dot-commers were moving on that I never stopped to consider the fact that they will do the same damage wherever they go. They are like a swarm of locusts!"

Evolutionarily favored locusts, though, as the London Observer's Robin McKie reported this Sunday on an academic debate over the future of the future.

While a small group of scientists believe that humans have stopped evolving, University of California at San Diego biologist Christopher Wills thinks it may be that our evolution is just less obvious. "There is a premium on sharpness of mind and the ability to accumulate money," said Wills. "Such people tend to have more children and have a better chance of survival."